


A Newfound Felinity

by coinin



Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: Animal Transformation, Cats, Crack, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-20
Updated: 2013-01-20
Packaged: 2017-11-26 06:37:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/647650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coinin/pseuds/coinin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Cougar steps on something and turns into a cat. It's a little awkward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Newfound Felinity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chibifukurou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chibifukurou/gifts).



> This little bit of ridiculousness is for you, Chibifukuro! Hope you like it! :)  
> Thanks to everyone who encouraged me when I was lacking inspiration. You're the best.

“Man, I really want to make a pussy joke,” Jensen says weakly, because when confronted with the impossible, his brain defaults to humor. Huh. Good to know.

“No,” Roque replies, and smacks Jensen upside the head.

Cougar yowls, which is the crux of the problem, right there: where they once had a fully human sniper, they now have an extremely angry domestic shorthair cat. Jensen is not mentally or emotionally equipped to deal with this. Terrorists? Yeah, Jensen can deal. Life-threatening injuries, also fine. Bailing out of a stolen aircraft into the Pacific Ocean, still all good. Teammates turning into cats? Emphatically _not okay_.

“Here, kitty kitty?” Jensens wheedles, crouching down and extending one hand toward Cougar. The look Cougar gives him is the very definition of batshit insane – ears flat back, eyes wide and crazy – and he skitters toward Jensen, scrambling up his arm and clinging to his shoulders. “Ow! Ow, _claws_ , you furry motherfucker!” Jensen shrieks, and he’s not even ashamed that he sounds perilously close to his niece in pitch - Cougar’s claws are like _needles_.

Cougar lets out a hissing growl and hunkers down.

Upon closer inspection, there is a tangle of stuff - grubby twine, several sticks, what may have once been a beetle, a spent shell, and an egg, now crushed - under Cougar's empty boot. Jensen prods dubiously at it, wishing he had some way to take a photo, but he can hear a lot of angry shouting and it’s coming swiftly closer. Roque drags Jensen away almost before he has a chance to grab Cougar's gear. Cougar, still regrettably feline, has wedged himself between Jensen's pack and the back of his neck, and Jensen can feel it when Cougar growls. He's growling a lot. Jensen would fear for his jugular, so close to Cougar's claws, but said claws are otherwise engaged in hanging on for dear life.

"What're we gonna tell Clay?" Jensen gasps, grimacing his thanks when Roque grabs Cougar's pack from him. "This is gonna suck so much."

"No shit," Roque hisses back.

Pooch arrives in a spray of gravel and they scramble in, Roque shouting at Pooch to _Drive, goddamnit,_ and Pooch asking where Cougar is even as he throws the Humvee in gear and gets them out as fast as possible. It's noisy and chaotic and pretty much par for the course, until Cougar yowls.

"Jensen," Pooch says in the relative quiet that follows, "what in the name of the little baby Jesus did you bring into my vehicle?"

***

"Where the hell is my sniper?" Clay asks, forty minutes later.

'"Well sir, that's an interesting story," Jensen replies, feeling more than a little manic.

"He turned into a cat," Roque says flatly, as if he's daring anyone to challenge him.

Clay blinks. He opens his mouth as though to speak, stops, and shuts it again. Cougar takes advantage of the lull to scramble down from Jensen's shoulders and flee to the kitchen area. There's a wild scrabbling sound, and then silence. 

Roque looks over. "If you want a location, he's on top of the fridge."

Clay sits down heavily, one hand over his eyes. "I need a drink," he says, finally.

"Wait," Jensen says warily, "you actually believe us?"

"No, I believe Roque," Clay replies. "He wouldn't pull this shit for fun," he adds in a mutter.

***

Cougar makes an elegant cat. He's small and lean and tawny-brown, with thick, soft, short fur; his tail long and expressive, darker at the tip like it has been dipped in ink. Jensen thinks Cougar rather resembles a Burmese.

Cougar's eyes, though, are the same dark brown they were when he was human. It's unsettling.

***

They're all grimy, hungry, and exhausted, so dealing with the non-proverbial cat in the room gets put off until they've eaten and dealt with the worst of the dirt. This particular bolt hole doesn't have a shower, which means it's tepid sponge baths all around, followed by MREs. Not a five-star hotel, but no one's complaining. Well, no one's complaining very much. Insufficient indoor plumbing pales in comparison with Cougar's newfound felinity.

When everyone (minus Cougar, who's still on top of the refrigerator and who has violently resisted all attempts to remove him) drifts back into the main room, Jensen leans back from his Toughbook and stretches.

"Best guess so far is that Cougar stepped on a witch's shamble and it put some kind of hinky mojo on him."

"Witch's whatnow?" Pooch asks, looking unconvinced. Jensen doesn't blame him; the explanation is not Jensen's best work.

"Shamble. It's, uh. Straight out of Terry Pratchett, actually, which really makes me wonder about what Sir Terence knows that he's not telling us, but basically, I have no fucking clue, the internet has no fucking clue, so I'm falling back on speculative fiction." A long silence falls after Jensen finishes speaking.

"Great, we're getting our intel from fantasy books now," Pooch sighs. 

"Could be worse," Jensen replies with a half shrug. "Could be Gaiman, then we'd be fucked."

Only Roque laughs.

***

When he’s stressed, Jensen gets nightmares. He never dreams about any of the places he’s been, any of the things he’s done or had done to him - no, that would make sense. Tonight it starts with that old standby, the college anxiety dream. There’s some lower-division general ed course that he needs to graduate, and of course he hasn’t been going all quarter and the final is next week -

 _But I graduated_ , Jensen thinks groggily, and suddenly there are zombies. The problem with having intimate knowledge of bloodspatter patterns is that his subconscious has lots of material to draw from: Jensen’s zombie dreams are _really gory_. He can run, which is a nice change of pace from the way these dreams usually go, but of course it doesn’t do any good, and he’s down, a half-rotted _thing_ crawling up his body, clawing at his face, meowing -

Wait, _meowing_?

Jensen opens his eyes to Cougar sitting on his chest, tail coiled around all four feet and twitching slightly. As Jensen blinks sleep from his eyes, Cougar reaches forward and pats at his face with a velvet paw. Jensen makes an incoherent noise and bats Cougar’s paw away. He doesn’t need cat fur in his mouth at ass o’clock in the morning. Cougar catches Jensen’s hand, biting gently at his thumb, then walks the rest of the way up his chest and butts his head against Jensen’s chin. Jensen sighs - figures Cougar would be just as pushy as a housecat - and unzips his sleeping bag partway. Cougar makes a little _prrt_ noise before curling up under Jensen's chin. He's still there in the morning, his whiskers tickling Jensen's throat.

***

"No, he's a cat," Clay says for at least the third time. He had been calling in a status update, but judging from the way he's now pinching the bridge of his nose and frowning, Jensen thinks he's probably been transferred to some paper pusher - military bureaucracy, and the myriad joys thereof, has never been Clay's favorite. "Not 'caught', a _cat_. Four paws, whiskers, a tail, the whole nine yards." He pauses, then, " _Felis catus_ , that's right." There's another pause, during which Clay looks at Roque and mimes cutting his own throat, and then he says, "That's great you don't have a form for that. Meanwhile, I don't have a sniper. You want to tell me who's in more trouble, here? Wait, is there a fucking _precedent_ for this? No, I will not watch my goddamn language, thank you very much."

Jensen takes his bitter, acidic, instant coffee - nasty, but the only available source of caffeine - and escapes before he has to bear witness to anything that could be used against Clay in a court martial hearing. There are reasons Clay is stuck commanding his band of misfits, reasons which have much to do with his winning personality and complete inability to interface gracefully with the chain of command. Jensen figures Roque can sort out any snafus; that's basically his job, after all: pick up Clay's shit. He wanders out to the main room, where Pooch is sitting on the floor and facing the ratty couch, an open tin of smoked sprats on the floor in front of him. 

"Cougar under there?" Jensen asks, marvelling again at the weirdness that is his life.

The darkness under the couch hisses before Pooch can answer, and he rolls his eyes in the direction of the noise. 

"Found those in the cupboards, figures they'd be better than an MRE-"

"Because cats are obligate carnivores and the stuff they feed us is half corn protein," Jensen finishes.

Pooch shrugs. "Figured they smelled better. What’d you do, read Wikipedia?"

"Something like that. Smelly works too. He hasn't eaten-"

"Since yesterday morning, unless he keeps snacks in with his ammo."

"Wouldn't put it past him." Jensen flops down on the floor next to Pooch. If he leans over, he can just see two reflective eyes in a cat-shaped shadow lurking under the couch. Jensen abandons his laptop - he had been reading hopelessly through increasingly out-there New Age websites in search of anything that might be useful in reversing Cougar’s transformation - in favor of this possible source of entertainment. 

Perhaps half an hour later, Cougar emerges just far enough from the depths of the undercouch to snake a paw out and delicately retrieve a single sprat. This is followed by a muffled crunching noise, and then a second sprat disappears. He polishes off the entire tin in less than five minutes, after which he slinks out and sits down to clean his whiskers. When he has satisfied his exacting feline hygiene standards, he stands up and pads over to where his own gear is piled by the door and stares pointedly back at his human teammates.

“Yeah, you’re gonna have to try again, buddy,” Pooch says with a shrug. “I got nothing.”

Cougar’s eyes narrow, and for a second his ears go flat. He reaches out and pats at his rifle case, looking back expectantly.

“One syllable, rhymes with fun,” Jensen says. “Sweet zombie Jesus, Pooch, we are playing charades with a cat.”

Cougar hisses, but then he’s never liked charades. He pats the rifle case again, then licks his paw and washes his face, before once more looking back at Jensen and Pooch. 

“You want us to clean your rifle?” Pooch asks dubiously.

“ _Miau_ ,” Cougar replies, and trots back to twine around Pooch’s shins.

Pooch sets up shop on the splintery table they have been using as both dining table and headquarters, displacing Clay and his ongoing phone conversation. Jensen drops his laptop on the nearby counter, unwilling to get it anywhere near the grease and grime of gun cleaning, and watches Pooch. Cougar hops up on the table and settles in at a safe distance to oversee the proceedings, and for several long moments everything is quiet industry. 

“Cougar would never trust me with his weapon,” Jensen says forlornly, breaking the silence.

“Jay, I’m not touching that one with a ten foot pole,” Pooch replies, picking up the bore snake. Cougar is instantly alert, tail twitching. 

“Oh, fuck you, that’s not what I meant and you know it,” Jensen says, but he still snorts as Cougar crouches down, butt wiggling as he tracks his prey. When Pooch jerks the snake sideways, Cougar pounces, biting ferociously.

“You keep telling yourself that, Jensen. You just keep telling yourself that.” Pooch twitches the bore snake, chuckling when Cougar rolls over, snake clutched in all four paws. He looks up, disappointed, when the it stops moving and chirps inquisitively. Jensen and Pooch both burst out laughing.

***

When Jensen finally goes to bed that night, he finds Cougar curled up in the center of Jensen’s sleeping bag. Cougar yawns and stretches luxuriantly before moving away. As soon as Jensen settles in, Cougar is back to curl up under his chin. Jensen can feel Cougar’s purr vibrating in his jaw.

***

Several days and hours of phone calls later, Clay has located a lady friend (who miraculously hasn't tried to kill him yet, though Roque thinks this is only because they haven't been in the same country for more than two days in the last five years) who knows someone who has a sister who has a friend whose godmother has a next-door neighbor whose grandmother happens to be a witch. Or at least they hope she's a witch; if she isn't they're going to look monumentally stupid showing up on her doorstep with a cat in tow, claiming that he used to be a man named Carlos Alvarez. So far, signs are pointing toward witch - they’re standing outside a shabby trailer in a clearing on the edge of the Belorussian forest, in a tangled, overgrown garden thick with bees; the trailer’s windows are opaque with grime, its axles settled crookedly into the earth. Jensen looks for evidence of chicken feet, but sees none.

Cougar’s tail is twitching in agitation by the time they knock on the door. The woman who opens the door has sharp eyes set in a face as lined and brown as that of an apple doll.

“Four men and a cat,” she says in accented English, looking them over. “Or rather five men, one a cat. As payment, you and you,” she points at Clay and Roque, “go bail my idiot grandson Dmitri out of jail. He drinks too much, he drives his tractor off the road, what can you do? His grandfather held his liquor better. Maybe troika are harder to drive off roads, who knows. Come on then, in, in, no dawdling,” she finishes suddenly, dragging Jensen and Pooch into the trailer and shutting the door in Clay’s face. Pooch looks sidelong at Jensen, raises an eyebrow in silent communication. Jensen nods minutely - the witch may be crazy, but she doesn’t seem to be a threat.

The inside of the trailer is cozy and bright. Sunlight streams through sparkling windows framed by spotless white lace curtains, gleams off copper pans hanging over a tiny stove, fractures in rainbow glints through a cut crystal candy bowl, settles warm and inviting on the bed’s handwoven counterpane. Jensen looks suspiciously from the windows to the living space that seems larger than could possibly be contained by the dilapidated trailer he remembers seeing from the outside, and decides that willful ignorance is the way to preserve what little sanity he has left. There are fresh herbs in little pots on the windowsill, shelves full of dried herbs and unidentifiable things in jars and canisters, drying herbs hanging in bundles from the ceiling, and a heavy brass mortar and pestle given pride-of-place on the well-scrubbed counter. In the far corner, there’s an old-fashioned milk churn, currently being used as an umbrella stand, with a bird-shaped novelty lamp balanced haphazardly on top of the dasher. If the old woman isn’t a witch, then she’s certainly got the act down.

“Oh, you are a handsome boy, yes?” she coos as she scoops Cougar off Jensen’s shoulder, effortlessly restraining him when he tries to scramble away. “Now now, you be good and we’ll soon have you right, yes? Be good for Baba.” She drops Cougar on the bed, shaking one finger admonishingly before he can slink off, and turns to the shelves of herbs. Into the mortar and pestle go a pinch of this and a dash of that, something that smells like churches and something else bitter and astringent that makes Jensen sneeze. She pulls a carton of goats’ milk out of her mini fridge and pours some into a saucer, mixing in a dollop of dark reddish-gold honey. While Cougar is drinking that, she upends the mortar, showering him with herb dust. She looks on with evident interest as Cougar shakes violently and sneezes, once, twice, three times - 

“Whoops, no pants,” Jensen says cheerfully - there’s Cougar, beautiful, human Cougar, looking irritated but distinctly non-feline.

“Very handsome indeed,” the witch says, before Pooch, spoilsport that he is, hands Cougar a nearby blanket and his own jacket.

“Good to have you back, man,” Pooch murmurs. Cougar nods, combing his fingers through his hair and grimacing at the herb fragments that fall out.

The witch insists they sit down for gingerbread and strong black tea while they wait for Clay and Roque to come back with Dmitri. Jensen watches Cougar relax, little by little, and smiles to himself. It’s unexpectedly pleasant, though Jensen swears he sees the bird lamp wink at him as they’re leaving.

***

Jensen would like to say he’s completely happy to have Cougar back to normal, but in truth he’s going to miss finding a cat asleep in his bed every night. Luck, as it turns out, is a lady with a strange sense of humor, and does Jensen one better - when he finally drags himself away from his computer, with gritty eyes and chilled from sitting still for too long, there’s a man in his bed. Cougar’s sleepy smile kindles an aching warmth behind Jensen's breastbone, one that spreads until he's not cold at all, and he smiles in return.

_Fin_


End file.
